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It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!

Thanks guys, I've printed the Ditson score out, and will have a proper look tomorow, I'm finding this hard lol, hope I can pull it off. I suppose the key is just to keep going

Wayne, I apologise if I put you into a spin. To suggest trialling the ditson fingering for only an hour might have caused a bout of panic, maybe a sense that there’s so much to do you should quickly pass on to the next task? I meant only that within an hour you would probably begin to see that there was another way of doing things.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of good fingering. It’s a foundation stone. You’ve got that much time you should take however long is required to get it right.

My Alfred Masterworks edition of the complete Songs Without Words, edited by Maurice Hinson, arrived. I like the explanatory and interpretive information Hinson gives about the Songs, but it turns out that, for Op. 30 No. 3 at least, in most places I prefer the fingering I got from the Peters edition edited by Theodor Kullak that I found on imslp. Kullak gives more fingering in essential places, and it's subtler, in particular in using finger 4. The one place I might prefer Hinson is in a measure of descending first inversion RH chords. Kullak gives a varied fingering that I suspect is meant to improve legato. Hinson gives a straight-forward series of 125, and achieves legato with pedal. But I'll give the Kullak fingering a try, because so far in all the places where I've thought "that's an odd fingering", his fingering has turned out to be very clever and efficient.

On the other hand, Hinson gives explicit pedal suggestions, which I shall probably adopt.

And, oh look, the Kullak-edited Peters edition is available to buy. (I appreciate imslp as a resource, but I dislike playing from flimsy printed-out sheet music and having unattached sheets of paper floating all over my piano. I like my music corralled in a book. Yes, I could put the print-outs in a notebook, but what a pain, and it's never as compact as a printed book.) It seems sort of silly to have not one, but two, editions of the Songs Without Words when almost all of them are much too hard for me and, unlike the Beethoven Sonatas or the Bach Preludes and Fugues, they're not my dream aspirational pieces. But I think I will buy this edition anyway.

I might consider doing a second one too! I'm just not sure which ones are possible for me to learn in 2-3 months. wrt a lot of what's left, I don't think I have a chance. :P It is sooo tempting though. I like 38/3 and 38/5, which i'm sure are too difficult---I'm also liking 85/1. Maybe someone else will choose some of those and relieve this temptation?

Hi Wayne, Have you considered writing the list in a collaborative editor? Thus, each participant can sign up directly, and everyone would have a single point where they can see and edit the list.

I thought about this too. A simple option, Wayne permitting, would be to allow any of us to copy paste the most recent list with his own update/ammendment which becomes the new latest list. Any abuse of the system -like me rubbing out Sam S's name against 38,6 and substituting my own - would be immediately apparent.

I would love to be able to learn a second one, but I am being sorely challenged by my current one, reportedly the easiest of them all.

I'm currently stuck in the middle, trying to memorize the descending series of first inversion chords. I think I'm going to have to learn them one by one. First just one chord. Then two chords, over and over. Then three chords, over and over and over. Then four chords...

I don't understand how people who memorize easily do it.

And memorization, hard as it is for me, isn't even the biggest of my challenges on this.